754 deborah howard
the Loggetta—that were rising in Piazza San Marco in the same years.40
Later, Andrea Palladio created the woodcuts for Daniele Barbaro’s Italian
translation of Vitruvius in 1556, providing a canonical version of Vitruvian
theory.41 Palladio’s I quattro libri dell’architettura (1570) refined the legacy
of Serlio, presenting his own portfolio of domestic designs alongside the
works of antiquity.42
In 16th-century architectural culture, the printed treatise furnished a
body of theoretical knowledge that continually interacted with practice.43
The use of the vernacular, the role of images, and the relative cheap-
ness of the editions allowed architectural theory to permeate down the
social scale. No longer the preserve of princes, churchmen, and humanist
scholars, architectural theory became accessible to the educated public,
the architect, and even the proto [supervisor of building works]. More-
over, the printed treatise embodied the authority of the editio princeps:
the unchanging consistency to be found in every copy of each edition,
ready for annotation by the owners who formulated their own responses
as marginalia. Although theory and practice followed parallel tracks, each
with its own narrative, at the same time information and ideas passed
continually to and fro between them. The ultimate victory of classicism
over the Gothic style in Venice was assured by its support in print cul-
ture. Subsequently, the treatises of Scamozzi, Bertotti Scamozzi, and Mili-
zia developed the orthodox classicism of Palladio from an increasingly
academic perspective.44
40 The Mint (Zecca) was begun in 1536, the Library in 1537, and the Loggetta in 1538.
Deborah Howard, Jacopo Sansovino: Architecture and Patronage in Renaissance Venice
(New Haven/London, 1987), pp. 8–47; Manuela Morresi, Jacopo Sansovino (Milan, 2000),
pp. 182–227.
41 I dieci libri dell’architettura di M. Vitruvio, trans. and ed. Daniele Barbaro (Venice,
1556). The publisher was Francesco Marcolini.
42 Andrea Palladio, I quattro libri dell’architettura (Venice, 1570).
43 Jean Guillaume, ed., Les traités d’architecture de la Renaissance (Paris, 1988); Vaughan
Hart and Peter Hicks, eds., Paper Palaces: The Rise of the Renaissance Architectural Treatise
(New Haven/London, 1998).
44 Vincenzo Scamozzi, L’idea della architettura universale, 2 vols (Venice, 1615); Ottavio
Bertotti Scamozzi, Le fabbriche e i disegni di Andrea Palladio (Vicenza 1796); Francesco
Milizia, Le vite de’ più celebri architetti d’ogni nazione e d’ogni tempo, precedute da un saggio
sopra l’architettura (Rome, 1768); idem, Principi di architettura civile (Finale [Vicenza],
1781). See also Daniel McReynolds, Palladio’s Legacy: Architectural Polemics in Eighteenth-
Century Venice (Venice, 2011).